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When he set out to snap neon signs across the city six years ago, Thomas Rinaldi found that certain challenges came with the territory.

He had to locate them, for starters — of the tens of thousands of signs installed in New York City between the 1920s and the 1950s, he estimates around 450 remain. He had to schedule shoots for dusk, during the narrow window when signs would be lit but total darkness hadn’t yet set in.

But mostly, he was up against the speed at which such signs are disappearing. He’d regularly set out to shoot one, only to arrive and find he was too late.

“That happened over and over,” says Rinaldi, 33, an architectural designer and longtime lover of the brash, buzzing displays. “Google Street View would still have it, but you’d get there, and it’d be gone.”

Still, Rinaldi found many a sign to capture, and the resulting images are collected in his new book, “New York Neon,” out next week.

Rinaldi — who talks neon at nyneon.blogspot.com — shared the stories behind a few with The Post.